Sri Lanka’s parliament passed a no-confidence vote against the controversially appointed government of Mahinda Rajapakse Wednesday, a day after the Supreme Court overturned a presidential decree dissolving the legislature. Speaker Karu Jayasuriya ruled that a majority of the 225-member assembly supported a no-confidence motion against Rajapakse who was made prime minister on October 26 in place of Ranil Wickremesinghe. Parliament convened for… Read more »
Three leading Hong Kong democracy campaigners pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges related to their involvement in massive rallies calling for political reform, as room for opposition in the semi-autonomous city shrinks under an assertive China. The pioneering trio are among nine activists all facing “public nuisance” charges for their participation in the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests. The charges… Read more »
Asia-Pacific leaders failed to agree on a communique at a summit in Papua New Guinea on Sunday for the first time in their history as deep divisions between the United States and China over trade and investment stymied cooperation. Competition between the United States and China over the Pacific was also thrown into focus with the United States and its Western allies launching a… Read more »
Recently elected governor of Okinawa, Denny Tamaki, has vowed to resolve to US military base dispute on the island of Okinawa. Since 1945 after World War II the United States military has maintained its presence in Japan and more specifically on the island of Okinawa where about half of the 54,000 Japanese stationed US soldiers are located. Near the end of the war,… Read more »
China on Tuesday issued an ardent defence of the alleged mass internment of minorities in its far west Xinjiang region, with a regional official insisting that authorities are saving Muslims from the lure of religious extremism. Beijing has sought to counter a global outcry against the facilities with a series of op-eds and interviews and a roll out of new… Read more »
France’s prime minister has visited the site of the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, which led to the end of French presence in Indochina. Édouard Philippe is the second French leader to travel there, after then-President François Mitterrand in 1993. Mr Philippe laid flowers at memorials for the dead on both sides, and called for France and… Read more »
On November 4, 2018, New Caledonia said “yes” to France. The Pacific territory should, therefore, remain French for a few more years, but according to the Noumea Accord, a new referendum should take place in 2020, and if, once again, the result is a “no” to independence, a last referendum could be organized in 2022. In this case, if Caledonians… Read more »
With an American father, the new governor of Okinawa may seem like the ideal negotiator to deal with a dispute between the Japanese authorities and the island’s residents over the construction of a new US military base there. Denny Tamaki, the newly elected governor of Okinawa, has made reducing the Americanmilitarypresence on the island a key priority. When the Japanese government announced this… Read more »
A UN investigator took interest in the Genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, stating that the genocide is still in occurrence despite the more than 700,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh in the last year. The Myanmar ambassador to the UN publicly denied these statements saying ” [they were] made on unverified circumstantial evidence with no sound legal proof.” Russia and China who… Read more »
MANILA: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte fired the head of the Bureau of Customs on Thursday (Oct 25) and ordered all top bureau officials replaced after the agency failed to intercept more than a tonne of drugs, the second such case in two years. Duterte has made a bloody fight against drugs the centrepiece of his administration since he won a… Read more »
